Annabelle Sreberny Distinguished Lecture with Burçe Çelik

What happens to our theories of infrastructural power when its history is written from imperial peripheries? Critical scholarship has powerfully demonstrated how infrastructures were integral to the violence of liberal imperialism and capitalism. This talk contributes to these debates by asking what is specific about communications infrastructures and the forms of power they materialise. Drawing on archival research tracing communications from nineteenth-century telegraphy and wireless to satellite and digitally mediated systems across British and American imperial formations in the Middle East, I approach communications infrastructures as socio-material systems that organise and distribute connectivity itself. Across imperial centres and peripheries, they have materialised radically differentiated forms of connection: civic and communicative capacities associated with liberal democracy and the public sphere, alongside violent connectivity through which racialised subjects and territories are made reachable, knowable and governable. Such connectivity operates through physical, affective, psychological and epistemic forms of violence. I attempt to theorise this uneven distribution of civic and violent connectivity as the dialectics of infrastructural power. While communications infrastructures assume new technological forms, reorganising space and setting new tempos for communicative life, they also sediment and reactivate older imperial logics. A longue durée perspective thus reveals a persistent yet transforming imperial cartography of connectivity, in which colonial relations endure, mutate and acquire new material forms, and violence remains unevenly distributed towards racialised peoples and those resisting dispossession.

Burçe Çelik is Professor of Politics and History of Communications at Loughborough University London. Her latest book is Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History (Illinois University Press, 2023). Her work examines communications infrastructures across different historical periods and geographies, with a particular interest in their relations to power, empire, capitalism and militarisation. Her recent research project, Coloniality and Communications, examined British telecommunications networks in twentieth-century Mesopotamia and their role in the material organisation of colonial power. She is currently working on the historicisation and theorisation of infrastructural power, tracing the changing relations between communications, liberalism, imperialism, capitalism and militarisation from the nineteenth century to the present.